


What Strange Comforts

by Masu_Trout



Category: Deus Ex (Video Games)
Genre: Aftermath of Violence, Feelings Realization, Hurt/Comfort, Injury Recovery, M/M, Post-Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, Sharing a Bed
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-24
Updated: 2019-06-24
Packaged: 2020-04-23 21:28:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,948
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19159336
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Masu_Trout/pseuds/Masu_Trout
Summary: "You show up in my hotel room, bleeding out, and then you try to tell me it's not my business what happened to you?"When Adam is badly injured on a mission, there's only one person he can think of to turn to.





	What Strange Comforts

**Author's Note:**

  * For [psychomachia](https://archiveofourown.org/users/psychomachia/gifts).
  * Translation into Русский available: [Разве странно заботиться](https://archiveofourown.org/works/21607432) by [Varda_Elentari](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Varda_Elentari/pseuds/Varda_Elentari)



> David/Adam! :D Such a great, twisty ship. I loved your idea of David being the one to come to the rescue, and I hope you enjoy this.

David got back to his hotel room at half past one in the morning, buzzed on adrenaline and the champagne they'd been serving at the conference hall. 

It'd been a while since he was last invited to a professional event, but he hadn't lost the habit; he'd thrown himself into the heart of the party, and—as the night wore on, drinks flowing as readily as the conversations did—he'd watched people's smiles lose their tension as they forgot they were talking to _David Sarif, disgraced CEO_ and started talking to just plain David instead.

His mood was sky-high, the sort of happiness that couldn't be broken—and then he took the first step into his room, the door swinging shut behind him, and his heart dropped to his feet. 

For a moment, with the lights from the hallway illuminating the room, he'd seen three dark drops of blood on the carpet.

Suddenly, he felt very, very sober.

David fumbled for the light switch on his right, but paused over the panel. His mind was racing. Would it be better to flip it or not? He'd already given away his position, whoever was in here knew exactly where he was... but maybe they hadn't yet realized that _he_ knew he wasn't alone in here. It might be better to turn and run for the door, but then again he might be putting a target on the back of his skull by doing that. He could all too easily imagine it: the soft _crack_ of a silenced gun, a stab of pain between his ears the last thing he ever felt.

Blood, though... blood was strange. David found it hard to imagine his assailant-to-be had cut their hand unlocking his door and then simply forgotten to clean it up. 

_Fuck,_ David thought. He could think of a thousand different possibilities, each more unlikely and more unhelpful than the last. And whoever was in here hadn't shot him yet. Maybe if he was quiet...

David took a small step backwards. The lush carpet muffled the sound of his footsteps. His hand drifted towards the breast pocket of his suit and the small, discreet blade hidden there as he slowly moved closer to the door. He didn't dare turn around; he reached out blindly, wincing when his knuckles clicked loudly against the handle he was looking for. 

There was a noise, then, from the other side of the room. A rustle of fabric, a guttural gasp—and then, a moment before David turned to flee, a voice. "Sarif..?"

David stopped. Let go over the door. Turned to face the darkness and the person hidden in it and said, incredulously, " _Adam_?"

Half on instinct, he reached out once more for the light switch. He was yelling at himself even as he turned the lights on— _how stupid can you be_ , anyone _could replicate a voice_ —but as the lights cycled up to full power all thoughts of his own safety dropped from his mind.

That was Adam, all right, sitting curled against the far wall with one hand on his side and his head hanging down. The man himself, here in the flesh. And the blood.

 _Especially_ the blood. 

The three drops he'd seen were just the beginning; there was a trail that started near the door to the balcony, went halfway to the door, and looped back to end right where Adam was hunched over. The walls, too, carried marks, rusty-looking smears in the outline of fingers or the edge of a palm where he must have stumbled and caught himself and kept on walking.

David's first, absurdly calm thought was, _The cleaning fee's going to be a bitch_. His second was, _Fuck_.

He ran the few steps to Adam's side, kneeling down beside him to try and get a closer look. "Shit, son. What happened to you?"

Adam turned his head just enough to catch a proper glimpse of David, and then there was a soft _snick_ as his glasses retracted back into their frames. His eyes, behind them, looked disturbingly unfocused, just massive pools of inky black surrounded by rings of gold and green. They should've adjusted to the new light levels the moment David hit the switch.

"Sarif," he said again. "Huh. You're actually..."

He sounded far too calm. David got the sense he was talking to himself more than anyone else.

"Adam. Come on, stay with me now. Where are you hurt?"

"Nowhere," he said, which—yeah, that was Adam, all right. At least _some_ things were still normal.

"Right," said David. "Come on, then, just let me take a look," and little by little he managed to slide away the arm Adam had defensively wrapped around himself just far enough to get a glimpse at what was beneath.

His tac-vest was... well, torn would be one word for the damage. _Completely destroyed_ would be another. The metal had folded and crumpled around a thin gash, about two inches long, just beneath Adam's ribs. He wasn't bleeding anymore, at least; David didn't know if he should be relieved, or if it just meant that Adam didn't have much left to lose.

David took a breath. He was glad his hands couldn't shake.

The damage looked—bad. But it should be survivable, for Adam if not for anyone else in the world. The Sentinel could repair organ damage, heal tissue, and rejuvenate a diminished blood supply at a rate beyond anything else on or off the market. Really, for all the injury looked hideous, the fact that Adam ended up in this bad a state was bizarre. The Sentinel should have closed the wound up long before he ended up this disoriented or this deathly pale.

Had something gone wrong with his augmentations? It couldn't be possible, David didn't want to believe it, but the evidence was screaming at him from less than a foot away.

He put a hand on Adam's shoulder, curling his fingers around the tac-vest's metal edge, and said, "Listen, son, we need to get you to a doctor. There's a specialist I know of at the hospital not too far away, she's as highly-rated as they come—"

"No," Adam snapped, harsh enough that David pulled his hand away on sheer startled instinct. "I can't... I'm not supposed to be here."

"I won't tell them where you came from. Trust me, they'll know better than to ask questions, especially these days."

" _Here_ ," Adam insisted, tapping one hand weakly against the carpet. Then, mouth working silently as if he was struggling to find the words, he added, "In the country. Don't have the permits."

"Shit."

France had been cracking down lately, too. If a badly injured foreign mil-spec Aug showed up without permits or even a passport—and David suddenly suspected there would be absolutely no records of Adam's arrival into the country anywhere—there was no telling what would happen to him. Jail time, he was sure, and not just a few days of it. There were no slaps on the wrist when you were packing the kind of heat Adam had.

"I can get you papers," David said, knowing even as he offered that it would be hopeless. Between the sluggishness and the confusion and how badly Adam had been hurt, it'd be impossible to get that kind of work done fast enough no matter how much David paid.

David thought about that a moment longer—the way his eyes weren't adjusting, the way his Sentinel wasn't activating, just _how_ badly addled Adam seemed to be—and the pieces clicked into place.

"Adam," he asked, "what's your battery at?"

Adam blinked at him. His brow furrowed. His mouth opened as if he were going to say something, but all that came out was a soft, indistinct little noise.

Right. _Fuck_. That was... not proof, not entirely, but pretty damn good evidence. At least this was something he could help with.

"Come on, here, let me"—David grabbed Adam's arm on his uninjured side and threw it over his shoulder, then tried to force them both vaguely upright. "Just a few steps, okay? And then you can lie down." 

It took a moment, but Adam struggled to his feet, leaning heavily on David but still managing to stand. (Lucky break, that; David wasn't strong enough to lift him if he didn't want to be lifted.) Three short, staggering steps, and then David let him fall face-first onto the bed. When he rolled Adam over onto his back, he left a rust-red imprint against the cream duvet in the outline of Adam's hip and torso.

Adam stared up at the ceiling, squinting even in the low light.

"Stay here a moment," David said, as if Adam could do anything else, and then rushed to the bathroom.

There was a kit tucked away in his carry-on, snuck beneath his toothbrush and his hair products and locked in a box meant to fool even the strictest airport security's scanners. He opened it with a press of his fingers, then fumbled through the contents.

Ten thousand credits in emergency neuropozyne, twenty in credit chips, a set of passports he'd had made up in case he ever really had to leave a country in a hurry... and, beneath all that, a trio of biocells. He'd almost debated adding them in; when would _he_ ever be at risk of running out of power?

David grabbed one of them, thought for a moment, grabbed them all, and mouthed a brief thanks to his past self.

On anyone else this would've looked like neuropozyne withdrawal. On Adam, that wasn't an option, but even he could still lose control of his augmentations occasionally. The circumstances just had to be _very_ specific. An EMP wouldn't normally be enough to phase Adam, not with the shielding the Rhino offered him. But add in an injury bad enough to force all power to reroute to his Sentinel, one that robbed his dermal armor of the energy it needed to auto-trigger upon receiving a shock... the results wouldn't be pretty. 

He had the feeling that, if he took a close look at Adam's wound, he'd see electrical burns around the entry point. 

_Bastards_. David scowled as he hurried back to Adam's side, uncapping the first of the biocells as he did. A weapon that perfectly-tailored didn't get created out of nowhere. Whoever'd done this had been gunning for Adam specifically.

He reached for the clasps of Adam's tacvest, pulling it off as quickly as he could without aggravating the wound any more. Adam drew a sharp breath as David worked his way down his injured side, unbuckling buckles and pulling back small magnetic clasps as he went, but otherwise didn't move. His skin, when David finally peeled the last of the vest away, was slick with sweat. He rested his hand a moment on Adam's stomach—feeling the layers of muscle, the coldness of his skin, the thin lines of scars old and new that marked his body—before tracing his way up to the port that sat just above Adam's heart.

The layer of artificial skin there slid away at David's touch. This particular port was a direct line to all his systems; it worked faster than channeling the current through any of his other augs would, and it also would hurt a hell of a lot more.

"Breathe in," David told him, just in case he could hear him, and then slid the cell home.

Adam grunted, fingers tearing through the duvet like it was paper, back arching, as the jolt raced through his body. "Ah," he groaned, and then, " _fuck_ ," falling panting back against the bed with his hands still clenching and unclenching in little arrhythmical jerks.

He blinked. His eyes caught David's, focused enough now to actually look at him.

"Hey," David said.

"You're here." He blinked again, looking around the room as if he was actually seeing it for the first time. "I... huh. I'm not dreaming." The words sounded halfway like a question.

"You're not, but you're probably going to wish you were. What's your battery level at?"

This time when Adam's eyes unfocused, it was just to look at his display. "Thirteen percent. Damn."

"Yeah, _damn_ is right. You were tripping, Adam, I couldn't even get a halfway coherent sentence out of you." He held the second of the biocells up between two gold-accented fingers. "You want to plug this in, or should I keep going?"

Adam lifted an arm to reach for it, but when he got his hand around the cell he winced. "My fingers aren't responding right."

"I'm not surprised, with how much blood and energy you've lost. Wait, here"—he gathered up the edge of the ruined duvet and pressed it against Adam's wound—"hold this in place, if you can. You're going to start having blood to lose again soon."

Adam jerked and swore and nearly let go of the duvet when David pressed the second biocell in. The third he took better—teeth gritted, eyelids pressed shut—and when David pulled the last of the biocells and ran his finger over the port to close it down again, Adam fell bonelessly back against the pillows at the head of the bed. 

Already the color was beginning to return to his cheeks. His skin felt warmer, and his breathing wasn't coming quite so ragged. David looked him up and down, hunting for any more signs of injury, and when his eyes made it to Adam's face Adam was staring back at him. His gaze darted towards the far wall the moment David caught him. 

"Christ, Adam," David sighed into the sudden silence. "You just about gave me a heart attack. What the hell _happened_ to you? Why are you in France?"

One of Adam's shoulders lifted in a sad little shrug. "You can guess, can't you?"

Like hell David could, with how little Adam bothered telling him these days—but even as he thought that he was considering the chances of Adam being _here_ , in the same building, and realization struck. 

"It was the conference, wasn't it?"

Adam didn't answer, but David could read his face.

" _Shit_." His mind was working overtime now, mulling over the implications of both Adam and the only group in the world who would bother to create a weapon _specifically_ to stop him being in the same place on the same night. "Should I not have tried the the cocktails?"

He'd heard all about the clusterfuck the Safe Harbour Conference had only just barely avoided. (Not from Adam, of course, because why would Adam bother to mention little tiny details like _that_ to him?) If they were trying that again, here...

The corner of Adam's mouth pulled up into a little half-smile, just for a moment. "No, you should be good." His voice turned to steel as he added, "And it's not your business what the mission's about."

"Not my... like _hell_ it isn't. You show up in my hotel room, bleeding out, and then you try to tell me it's not my business what happened to you? I thought someone was here to kill me!" 

"Sarif—"

The words burst from David's mouth, too quick to be stopped and too honest by half: "I thought someone had managed to kill _you_."

He could imagine it all-too-clearly: Adam, badly injured, lying cold and quiet on the floor. The memories of that day, almost three years old by now, were as vivid as if it all had happened just moments ago. Seeing Adam wounded was dredging those old fears back up.

Adam snorted. "Yeah. Would be a shame if your investment went to waste." He grimaced the moment he finished his sentence, fingers twisting on the bed as if he were going to reach up and pluck the words out of the air.

David gaped at him. "Is that what you think this is about? I didn't want you to die because I _didn't want you to die_. Today and... back then."

"Look..." Adam started, and then paused. His expression firmed into something sterner. For a moment David thought he might bring his glasses down again, but instead he only scowled at David with uncovered eyes as if challenging him. "You know what? Fine. The difference between today and _back then_ is that this time I woke up with the same body parts I fell unconscious with."

"Yeah, you also didn't get your heart and ribs _crushed_ tonight. Because they're stronger than that." _Because they're my design_ , he didn't add. He knew when to be humble. "You think anyone else's heart could have kept going after taking as much of a beating as yours did tonight?"

Adam spread one gold-accented palm wide. "I lost more than a heart that day."

"You gained more too. Everything you needed to survive."

"And then some," Adam said sardonically. 

David let his fingers dig into the bed, plucking at frayed strips of fabric. He'd known Adam'd had some growing pains, that things weren't always easy for him when it came to accepting his body. Hell, he'd expected that; change was hard as hell, even when it was necessary, and not everyone could always agree on how much change was necessary.

But this genuine anger, harsh and cold, threading through Adam's words even two and a half years later...

He hadn't seen that coming. He suspected Adam would have never let him see this if he weren't so woozy still; there was an honesty in his words built from the tearing-down of every last layer of armor he'd constructed around his heart. It left a strange, gnawing ache in the pit of David's stomach. He had no idea what to say to fix this.

"I never once did anything to you that I wouldn't have done to myself," he said.

Adam sighed. "Yeah. I know."

David wondered if he could explain to Adam, somehow, exactly what he'd had done to himself and why. His own eyes were based on the designs he'd created for Adam's, the same for his hands; every single piece that went into Adam had been the highest quality David could possibly provide. He'd never wanted anything but the best for Adam, in body or in life.

Would it make a difference to Adam, if he could manage to put that into words? 

Quality, strength, exclusivity: they meant a lot. To David, they meant everything. But—

Adam was his own person, entirely separate from David. His priorities were all his own. And of course David had always known that; he'd just never felt the weight of it so heavily before.

"I'm glad you came here tonight," he said, desperately. It was an abrupt change of topic, too sudden, too strange, _surely_ Adam would be annoyed—but some part of him felt he had to tell him that. "To me. I'm glad I could help you. And... I'm sorry if I didn't always help you in the way that you wanted."

Some strange tension fled from Adam's body then; he sank deeper back into the pillows, and his face relaxed into something that wasn't a smile. "You know," he said, staring up at the ceiling rather than at David,"I didn't mean to come here. I was supposed to head to the extraction point. But after I got hit I could barely even _think_... and I'd seen your info on the guest registry when we were prepping for the mission. Your room number kept running through my head. It was all I could remember. Instinct, I guess."

 _Instinct_ , huh. David liked that, somewhere deep down, the idea of Adam returning to him.

"I'm not going to thank you," Adam said after a moment, still not looking David's way. "For wanting to help me. I never asked you to do it."

David shrugged. "That's fair. You've saved my ass more than enough times, anyway. I can't ask for more than that."

Adam's eyes had fallen half-shut. He looked ready to fall asleep right then and there, even smeared with blood and sweat and smelling overpoweringly of gunpowder. His breathing seemed steady, his color had evened out. The bleeding, when David leaned over to check, had slowed to a stop with the blanket pressed over it. The Sentinel, finally working its magic. 

David had a feeling that, whatever happened tomorrow, they weren't going to talk about the conversation they'd just had any time soon. And some greedy piece of David wanted to demand more, wanted to peel back Adam's armor and see the parts of himself he'd been hiding from David, but... Well. Some things he wouldn't— _couldn't_ —force. Not if he wanted to keep seeing Adam.

(And David let his eyes roam across Adam's bare chest—taking in the sharply-defined muscle, the spots where skin gave way to augmentations he knew the designs of better than he knew the back of his own hand—and thought, _Yes_. He wanted to keep seeing Adam; he wanted to keep Adam; he _wanted_. Any way Adam would have him.)

There was another light switch near the bed. David tapped it to bring the room's lighting down as low as it could go without actually turning off. After a night like this one, he didn't really need complete darkness. He eyed the duvet a moment—ripped in a dozen places where augmented hands had torn right through it, Adam covered in sweat and reeking of the gunpowder lying in the middle—and nodded to himself.

He bumped Adam's hip with one hand. "Move over a bit, would you?"

Offering his hotel room was one thing, but taking the couch would be another entirely.

If Adam was taken aback at the thought of sharing he didn't show it, just shuffled a little closer to the side of the bed. David obligingly took the other side, kicking his shoes off and stripping away his dress shirt and suit coat as he tried to a comfortable way to curl up under the duvet. Adam was on top of most of it, and David sure as hell didn't feel like telling him to stand up right now. Maybe if he asked room service to bring a blanket? But then they'd have to come up here, and _that_ was going to be a mess he didn't want to deal with until he was fully sober and in possession of a cup of coffee.

"You're going to sleep like this?" Adam mumbled, already halfway asleep himself.

"I paid for a room, I'm going to use a room." If he stretched one arm up and out, he could mostly make it work. It also put him closer to Adam, which he honestly hadn't intended but wasn't going to complain about. "Better than some places I've slept."

A smile tugged at Adam's mouth, and David could just imagine what he was going to say—something about, _Right, Sarif, complain about the places_ you've _slept_ —but even before he had the chance to open his mouth his eyes had fallen shut.

It was a while before David could sleep. He was too full of adrenaline and too caught up in Adam's presence. Eventually, though, exhaustion won. The steady rhythm of Adam's breathing and the electrical hum of his heart followed David into shapeless, incoherent dreams.

(He woke up only once that night, to the feeling of Adam's body pressed against his back and metal arms wrapping around him. He was awake just long enough for a single coherent thought to slip through his mind— _He's here, I'm safe, everything's going to be okay_ —before sleep dragged him back under.)


End file.
